SSD Fetish

My first SSD just kicked the bucket. It is an OCZ Vertex 2 (2VTXE60G, but it formatted out to the older, larger capacity). I fear it is past warranty, but I'll leave that up to OCZ to decide. I got it as a ShellShocker, so it was fairly cheap when I purchased it. The most surprising thing about this failure is that this OCZ drive lasted so long (~3 years). All things considered, I'm pleased with its longevity when compared to most other OCZ Vertex 2 SSD I've read about. Now to find a replacement....

No. By failure I mean it is no longer recognized when connected. I've tried it on two separate motherboards that are known to be functional and it isn't recognized. It completely bombed out during a chkdsk scan and now it might as well not exist as far as Windows is concerned.

It was wishful thinking. While it is a potential failure mode, the apparently more commonly encountered case seems to be that the drive refuses to operate (or be detected) at all.

Or, when sufficient write cycles have been used, the drive (or at least specific sectors) succumbs to bitrot weeks/days/hours after last being written to. I had one drive with a specific firmware bug that tended to fail to read-only when it failed (I think one of the drive developers referred to it as "panic mode"), but the only evidence was that none of my writes would last through a reboot and it would crash eventually. It still wasn't really a "graceful" failure.

"Fail to read only" is the theoretical fail state of the flash itself IIRC. What we've seen so far is the controller dying, not the individual flash cells, and when the controller dies, the drive is completely dead.

"Fail to read only" is the theoretical fail state of the flash itself IIRC. What we've seen so far is the controller dying, not the individual flash cells, and when the controller dies, the drive is completely dead.

"Fail to read only" would be a more desirable state for a data recovery company. My understanding however is the proprietary nature of the data algorithms that make it hard to do that.

Laptop has been acting funky lately. Completely locking up, and I didn't have a chance to figure it out.

Today it locks up, and I am greeted by a wonderful kernel oops on hard reboot. And, I haven't done backups in weeks since I moved, annnd this is my BYOL for work. That's a nice surprise at 4:45pm.

I get home and immediately pop the Samsung 830 into my desktop and prepare myself for the worst. /home mounts cleanly and is immediately backed up and / mounts cleanly and is backed up. Hmm, maybe it's the laptop -- SATA controller or something??? Put the drive back in the laptop and same kernel oops. Back in the desktop and try to mount /boot: Cannot read superblock.

Seriously, I lost two hours at work and rushed home in a panic for a corrupted /boot?

Then, I try to recreate the /boot LV and get lots of errors. SMART doesn't report anything wrong, and wear is only at 44/98. The errors seem quite serious, and I'm really lucky that I didn't lose any data.

We'll see how Samsung support goes, but I can't get their support page to render the entire personal info form.

Anyone want to talk me out of a Samsung 840 256GB (non-pro) for an OS-X boot drive in a hackintosh? Not looking to spend over $180 or so as I also need a new drive for backups and need to start looking at more drives for the zfs box in the garage...

My traditional drive is just about full, and I want to put the OS, my frequently used virtual machines on the SSD and then symlink photos, videos, etc. off to a normal drive.

Anyone want to talk me out of a Samsung 840 256GB (non-pro) for an OS-X boot drive in a hackintosh? Not looking to spend over $180 or so as I also need a new drive for backups and need to start looking at more drives for the zfs box in the garage...

My traditional drive is just about full, and I want to put the OS, my frequently used virtual machines on the SSD and then symlink photos, videos, etc. off to a normal drive.

Assume I backup every few days to a spinny drive too...

Nope. I put one in a MBP and it's doing very well. I had slight concerns about longevity, but decided I was being silly

I got a 840 250GB yesterday, was on sale locally (£129.99 in PCWorld). It's a bit quicker in reads compared to a 830, but a bit slower in writes. It seems to work fine. Replaced an old Kingston 120GB that's getting wobblier by the week.

the Samsung 840 EVO is a pretty sweet SSD. It marries the budget appeal of the 840 Series with performance that more closely matches the 840 Pro. Throw in a nifty caching scheme, a faster controller, improved software, loads of encryption options, and a layer of optional DRAM cache, and it's no wonder I've been going on about the drive for so many pages. There's a lot more to the EVO than a NAND upgrade, which is all most new SSDs get these days.

I've got 17 days left of warranty left on my OCZ Agility 2 that has been sitting bricked for two years after two RMAs. What the hell, called OCZ and opened a ticket to have another RMA. Best case scenario is they've fixed the firmware so it stops bricking ... it's been three years after all. Worst case scenario I trust it with some important data that isn't backed up and I lose everything (which isn't going to happen).

Obviously it's $undefined years away from being a product, but the improvements sound pretty awesome if they're real. If Samsung is right and they can get density that high, then they'll leapfrog existing HDDs with multi-TB drives. That has the potential to kill spinning discs for good, unless they can keep up while keeping $/GB low.

Keep in mind that they are saying the technology should scale to one terabit per chip, which means that 8 chips would make a 1 terabyte drive (minus overprovisioning space). So, it's only a marginal improvement in space over existing technology, which I believe is currently 512 Gb/chip max.

The lifespan if significantly higher, that would reduce the need for overprovisioning. If they use 16 chips then that's at least a doubling of capacity which is nothing to sneeze at. But not bigger than a 4TB HDD, it's true. That'll take some more improvement.

Of course, maybe RRAM will replace everything, but that still looks like vapor right now. I'm more likely to believe Samsung actually has working prototypes than some startup.

Referencing those Samsung EVO drives, what's the expected actual usable formatted capacity of the 750 GB version? That could be a great sweet spot for my next build to hold all my "fast" data with plenty of room to grow over the next 4+ years.

Keep in mind that they are saying the technology should scale to one terabit per chip, which means that 8 chips would make a 1 terabyte drive (minus overprovisioning space). So, it's only a marginal improvement in space over existing technology, which I believe is currently 512 Gb/chip max.

Not to be purely argumentative, but I think a marginal improvement is not defined by a constraining attribute doubling in size. And not only that, but it is doubling in the same space, not just doubling the amount of chips.

Keep in mind that they are saying the technology should scale to one terabit per chip, which means that 8 chips would make a 1 terabyte drive (minus overprovisioning space). So, it's only a marginal improvement in space over existing technology, which I believe is currently 512 Gb/chip max.

Not to be purely argumentative, but I think a marginal improvement is not defined by a constraining attribute doubling in size. And not only that, but it is doubling in the same space, not just doubling the amount of chips.

Right, my point being that it's not a transformative technology -- particularly given that they have not yet reached 1 Tb/chip. I expect that it will allow cheaper/larger/faster/more reliable drives than without the technology, but like the big new technologies on hard drives (such as perpendicular bits) it doesn't seem like it's going to be any more of an improvement than the ones that have already happened. To end-users, it will just be part of what drives down prices and increases general capacity.

Seriously, after reading through this thread and some of the horror stories about little electronic "bricks", firmware/controller weirdness and whatnot, I'm pretty convinced that Samsung is the way to go.

It's wonderful to have the top performing hardware and all, but if reliability comes into question at all, forget it.

Exactly, it is that. I don't have time to benchmark the drive, as it's in a machine I can't let have any downtime for a while. I plan on using a different machine in the near future, so the 840 will be going in to my workstation. The M500 is in my laptop, so that could give issues doing a subjective comparison.

Of course, there's plenty of reviews of the 840, and I'm sure there's one that benchmarks it against the M500.

Seat-of-pants, subjective and anecdotal is all you're getting for now.